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Rex is not the only dog in the neighborhood carrying this kind of burden. When we go walking in the park—and our proximity to these 600 acres of trails is the primary reason I depleted my savings to buy a house here—we encounter many others like us. The dogs are overwhelmingly mixed breeds that, unlike Rex, have been rescued off the streets or from shelters. The owners are overwhelmingly female and overwhelmingly single. Like me, they have purchased homes in this neighborhood not only for the disheveled charms of the overgrown vegetation and absurdly steep and narrow streets but because this is an indisputably “dog-friendly” place. Flyers advertising dog walkers, pet sitters, subsidized spaying and neutering, and lost and found animals are perpetually pinned to telephone polls. An organized alliance of concerned pet owners (though they prefer the term “human guardian”) maintains a lively online message board, gathers food and bedding donations for local shelters, and runs a “pet photos with Santa” booth every year at the neighborhood holiday crafts fair.

I call this group the Dog Squad. I suppose I’m one of them, though the extent to which I want to be swings on a sort of pendulum between my visceral love for animals and the remaining vestiges of my ability to be rational about the way the world works. It bears mentioning that in addition to being mostly female and mostly single, the members of the Dog Squad are overwhelmingly Caucasian and middle to upper-middle class. That is to say, we’ve bought or rented homes in this neighborhood mostly in the last decade, which is roughly how long it’s been since the neighborhood began to shake off its reputation for having some of the worst gang violence in the city. We are the ones paying upwards of $500,000 for small bungalows because we know more of us are coming and despite the shifts in the market, the values are only going up. We are the ones with the hybrid cars and the Democratic-candidate signs in our yards, the ones on whom no one will ever file a noise complaint, the ones who place a simple wreath on the door at Christmastime rather than an entire team of high-wattage reindeer in our yard. We are the ones who don’t care how crappy the public schools are because we either don’t have school-age kids or, if we do, make a second career out of finding private or magnet schools that offer German classes and diving teams.

This is a fairly standard portrait of gentrification, of course. You’ll find it from Brooklyn, New York, to Oakland, California, and minus a few regional specifics, it all looks pretty much the same. This neighborhood, for its part, has always straddled the line between the bohemian mythology of its radical leftist roots and the majority rule of the Spanish-speaking immigrant population that has dominated it since the 1960s. On balance, tensions around here don’t run as high as you’d think. The white people, even the recent gentrifiers (among whose ranks I have no choice but to count myself) define themselves in distinct opposition to the kinds of white people who live in L.A.’s pricier areas. Our combination of earnestness (we have a pottery studio and a weekly antiwar rally) and tough, urban-pioneer posturing (we have green-haired hipsters smoking outside the coffee shop) gives us a liberal, egalitarian sheen you tend not to see in quieter, more manicured communities.

But my status as both a white person and a dog owner (I’ll continue to say “owner,” if only to convince myself I haven’t joined the cult entirely) has made me complicit in a pernicious kind of bigotry. More than once I have found myself entangled in a “rescue operation” involving a dog whose guardians have been deemed unsuitable by the Dog Squad. Depending on which Squad member you ask, “unsuitability” can run the gamut from having a debris-strewn yard to not registering adequate concern when the dog is found to be wandering the neighborhood. Depending on how politically correct that Squad member is, the underpinnings of these issues will either be chalked up to vague assertions like “people are so irresponsible” or the thornier—and more honest—recognition that what we’re dealing with has less to do with animals than with a treacherous gulf between two cultures.

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Meghan Daum is the author of Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived In That House, as well as the novel The Quality of Life Report. She also writes a weekly column for The Los Angeles Times. She lives in LA with her husband and their Sheepdog, Rex. meghandaum.com